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Lucy halts her mad rush. She turns back to Jane with an expression of great and pale strain. Like Jane, she’s clutching her book in one hand.
“Did you ever love someone,” Lucy says, “and know they love you, and you’re attracted to them, and you know they’re attracted to you, and so many things are exactly right, but it doesn’t matter, because the few things that are wrong are completely, totally fucked?”
“Are you talking about Ravi?” Jane says.
“I’ve made some unfortunate decisions,” Lucy says, then clutches her temples. “My head feels like it’s splitting open. Does yours?”
“What do you mean, unfortunate decisions? Like Ravi?”
“Oh,” Lucy says, “like a hundred things. Ravi is impossible. I can’t believe I’m talking to you about it. Never mind.”
“Have you made criminal decisions?” Jane says, thinking about the umbrella.
Lucy’s eyes widen. “Why on earth would you ask me that?”
“Sorry,” Jane says, confused. “I don’t know where that came from. I just feel really weird today.”
At that moment, Ravi pushes out of Octavian’s bedroom, putting a hot hand on either side of Jane’s waist and shifting her out of his way, not gently. He strides on down the hall toward his rooms at the corridor’s end, his face wet with tears. He doesn’t even glance at Lucy, who watches him go, folding the hard angles of herself up inside a disappointment she can’t hide.
Lucy’s phone starts ringing, but she doesn’t react. She’s still staring after Ravi.
“Your phone is ringing,” Jane says.
“What? Oh,” Lucy says, patting her front pockets, her back pockets, then producing a phone. She walks away, toward the house’s center, saying, “Yeah, what is it, Dad?”
Jane is left alone in Octavian’s doorway with the world’s most agitated dog. He’s gone back to head-butting Jane, as if he’s trying to knock himself unconscious against her shin.
Inside the bedroom, Octavian and Kiran are having a stare-down.
“Is this what it takes for you to visit your old dad?” says Octavian, passing a weary hand across his eyes. “Someone steals a sculpture?”
“You haven’t exactly come looking for me, either, Dad,” says Kiran. “You know I’ve been home.”
“Why would I push myself on you when I’m unwanted?”
“If Charlotte came home after all this time away,” Kiran says, “you wouldn’t sit back waiting for her to come to you.”
“That’s different,” says Octavian. “Charlotte left without any warning. I have no idea where she went, or why.”
“If I left without any warning,” says Kiran, “you’d accuse me of being selfish and immature. When Charlotte does it, you mope, and smoke too much, and stop taking showers, and oversleep. You knew I was coming yesterday and you didn’t even stay awake.”
“Kiran,” says Octavian. “Are you suggesting that I love my wife more than I love my daughter? That I wouldn’t be distraught with worry if you disappeared? Do you really believe that?”
“I’m saying you need to snap out of it,” says Kiran, suddenly angry. “Since when do you sleep all day, or not care if a major piece of art is missing?”
“So,” says Octavian, his voice rising too, “you’re mad at me because I’m depressed? Should I be mad at you because you’re depressed?”
“Yes!” Kiran cries. “You should! You should be subjecting me to long, boring talks about how I need a job, and how you think I’ve chosen the wrong man and I’m ruining my life!”
“You have chosen the wrong man!” says Octavian, almost shouting now. “You are ruining your life!”
“Then tell me so!” Kiran cries. “Don’t just shuffle around in your slippers mooning after Charlotte and acting indifferent to everything else!”
“I’m not indifferent!” says Octavian. “I’m just . . .” He stops, passing another hand over his eyes. “I’m tired.”
“So go for a walk!” says Kiran. “Go for a swim! Go to New York and buy a painting! Of course you’re tired! You never do anything!”
“I haven’t been able to think clearly,” Octavian says. “Not since Charlotte left.”
“I understand you’re hurt, Dad!”
“No,” says Octavian. “No! It’s not just that. It’s like she took some part of my brain with her when she left. I get confused, and I only want to be in the library. I get sleepy, and I lose track of time.”
“That’s not normal, Dad,” says Kiran. “You should go to the city and see your doctor.”
“I can’t leave.”
“What are you talking about? Of course you can leave.”
“Charlotte needs me, she wants me,” says Octavian.
“Charlotte isn’t here.”
“She’s close,” says Octavian. “If I stay here, and keep reaching, I can bring her back.”
“Dad,” says Kiran. “You’re not making sense. Bring her back from where? The underworld? Like Orpheus and Eurydice? Charlotte left! She went away!”
“She talks to me,” says Octavian. “She sings. She wants me to join her.”
“Okay,” says Kiran sharply, “that’s it. You’re delusional. After the gala, Ravi and I are putting you on a boat and taking you to the doctor and you don’t get to have an opinion about it.”
Jane is noticing something about the room, about the way the air seems buzzy and strange, as if there’s an extra energy to it. The buzziness is focused on Octavian. If the thing I’m sensing were visible, Jane thinks, Octavian would be blurry. As if he were existing partly in some other dimension.
“I bet you almost disappear when you’re in the library,” Jane says out loud to Octavian.
Kiran and Octavian both turn to stare at Jane, startled by her interruption. Below, Jasper nips Jane. Then he opens his mouth, clamps it around her calf, and bites, hard.
“Ow!” cries Jane. The room comes sharply into focus again and the buzzing drops away. “Jasper! You sadist!” He’s punctured a hole in her black-and-white-striped jeans. She wants suddenly to go outside and get some air. She needs some air. It’s a desperate, pressing need.
“I’m going for a walk,” Jane says to Kiran and Octavian. “Bye.”
Jasper turns and sprints into the corridor, hopping in anxious excitement. Jane follows him.
* * *
Jasper leads Jane down the stairs. For once, he doesn’t try to trip her. In the receiving hall, he herds her around a woman who’s picking pieces of lilac and glass from the floor. Jane doesn’t even notice the woman at first, which upsets her, that she’s so out of it, she almost steps on another human being. Aunt Magnolia, she finds herself repeating. Aunt Magnolia, Aunt Magnolia.
A framed photo on a side table catches her eye. It’s a portrait of a youngish blond woman with some other people and when Jane tries to go to it, Jasper herds her away with enthusiasm. The woman has a maniacal smile on her face. Jane knows it’s Charlotte. She cranes her neck to keep looking at it while Jasper shuffles her out the front door.
The moment she passes into the outside world, she begins to come awake again. She feels the straining sunlight on her skin and hears the pounding sea, the pushing wind. The sounds are normal, natural; there’s no strange pressure on her ears. Standing in the front yard, buffeted by wind and light, she takes a deep, jellyfish breath. Aunt Magnolia.
Jane thinks, suddenly, of the way her aunt died. Aunt Magnolia froze to death, in a blizzard. Hypothermia. Jane has learned, since then, from her doctor, some of the details of what it would have been like. Aunt Magnolia would have struggled with a mental fog like the one Jane has been experiencing today. An inability to remember things, to feel coherent and whole. She would have fought for clarity, but found it impossible, and finally given in to the fog. She would have had no choice.
Aunt Magnolia? Why did you send me to this strange, strange house? Did you know it would make me feel this way? She looks up. Tu Reviens stretches before her, huge and cold, pockmarked with windows and unmatching stones. It makes her think of an old dragon with missing scales and multiple beady glass eyes, protecting its treasure. It feels . . . lonely, she thinks. And hungry.
An instinct tells her that in future it might be wise to stay out of the library.
Jasper’s forging a path across the front yard through grass up to his neck, aiming for the east side of the house, where Jane can just make out the edges of the garden. Jane follows, pushing herself through the soggy grass, taking slow breaths.
